It's no secret that J.J. Abrams' rebooted Star Trek universe has been a source of consternation and displeasure for me since 2009, but while I've discussed the problems with the feel and storytelling of NuTrek rather extensively, there's one element of the reboot that I have yet to thoroughly critique: the Enterprise herself.

And yes, I'm enough of a fan to know that starship names should be italicized. You'll thank me someday when I talk about "the Enterprise of Enterprise" and you can readily identify which one's the TV show. But I digress.

I bring this up because, once a month, I receive two meticulously detailed and screen-accurate model starships from the Star Trek Official Starships Collection, each one accompanied by a magazine filled with neat photos of the featured ship, its fictional history within the Star Trek universe, behind-the-scenes stories about its real-world development, and distracting grammatical errors. (P.S.: Eaglemoss, if you ever need an editor with content area expertise...) The ships come from all corners of Star Trek's 50-year history: icons such as the USS Enterprise-D, the NX-01 (I'll refrain from saying "the Enterprise of Enterprise" so soon), and Deep Space Nine (which is a space station and not a starship, but I'm not complaining); that one cool ship you saw in the background in First Contact; that weird ship that only appeared in one episode of Voyager...really, anything and everything. Short of buying me an actual, functional starship, this is as good as it gets for a geek like me.

Aside from one disappointment (the refit Enterprise from The Motion Picture [TMP], which is perfectly acceptable until you see how much more surface detail went into all the other ships), every new ship has been a joy to unbox and put on display. Once every few months, a special issue becomes available, featuring a larger-than-usual ship for an extra charge. Some months ago, I was given the option to become the proud (?) owner of the Abramsverse Enterprise from the 2009 reboot.

This one. Source: Memory Alpha.

This was a challenging decision. On the one hand, I have so many problems with the design of the ship in question; I cannot readily call to mind any other ship from the entire franchise that I outright dislike. On the other hand, I was looking forward to a future special issue featuring the USS Vengeance from Into Darkness, and it wouldn't do to have the one NuTrek ship I like on a shelf without its rival beside it. Furthermore, there's always the possibility that a future film or TV series set in the Abramsverse will change my opinion about the reboot, and I'd regret missing the opportunity now to collect something I could like later. The completionist in me ultimately won out, and I've been trying to figure out how to feel about it ever since.

On its own, the design of the 2009 Enterprise (sounds like I'm talking about a car) is passable enough. If it were a ship designed by a new alien race or belonging to a different sci-fi franchise altogether, I don't think I'd mind it. It's sleek, it's curvy, it's glowy and full of lens flare. The problem is that it's a reimagining of a classic ship that, like the rest of NuTrek, ignores every precedent that should have informed its design.

The USS Enterprise of the original Star Trek (TOS) is simultaneously very '60s and very forward-thinking. The ship cuts a memorable figure, distinct from the flying saucers and rocket ships that had dominated science fiction up until that point, but the surface details are only slightly more complex than anything you'd see in Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon. It's retro and futuristic at the same time, which makes it difficult to revise for a modern audience without sacrificing some part of its identity. It's also a beloved icon, so someone is bound to complain, no matter what you do. I get that.

Do you know how hard it is to find a good on-screen picture of the original, non-remastered Enterprise anymore? Source: Memory Alpha.

I think the refit Enterprise created for TMP is a superb example of a revision done right, though. The ship's proportions and basic shape were left intact, more surface detail was added, and only a few elements (nacelles, deflector dish) were revamped substantially, modernizing the ship by tinkering with the existing blueprints. When you look at the subsequent Enterprises (B, C, D, E, and even J), it's apparent that the same design mentality was still in use; you can imagine each Enterprise being stretched or compressed into the shape of the next one in line, rather than being built from scratch.

This technically isn't the refit Enterprise from TMP, but it might as well be. Source: Memory Alpha.

Even the NX-01, designed for a TV show filmed decades after TOS but taking place a century before, has several key design elements in common with good ol' NCC-1701 (especially after the refit that was planned to happen if the show had remained on the air). If you can accept that somewhere between Enterprise and Next Generation there is a galaxy-wide revival of 1960s aesthetics that interrupts the otherwise consistent look of Star Trek, then it's not unreasonable to believe that Archer's Enterprise could evolve into Kirk's Enterprise.

Here's the thing: The Abramsverse doesn't reboot all of Star Trek; it only rewrites the timeline starting with the birth of James T. Kirk. This means that Zefram Cochrane still made his first warp flight in the Phoenix we saw in First Contact, and that the NX-01—whose design clearly took some measure of inspiration from the Phoenix—was still out saving the galaxy while Kirk's grandfather was in diapers. We even see models of these ships in Admiral Marcus's office in Into Darkness. So even if every other starship design principle of later Star Trek is thrown out the airlock, the Abramsprise should still look like a descendant of the Phoenix and the NX-01.

It doesn't even look like a distant relative. My wife says it looks like a Fisher-Price toy.

What even am I looking at? A giant squid? A good starship should look good from any angle.

And you can't peg this on Nero disrupting the timeline, either. Starfleet encounters all-powerful beings that destroy starships all the time, yet this one incident where a mystery ship obliterates a single vessel and then disappears for 25 years is enough to spook Starfleet engineers into building a USS Enterprise that's a caricature of the original timeline's ship, and twice as big. Bigger, in fact, than the largest vessels that Picard and Sisko bring into battle against the Borg and the Dominion a century later. I think the following chart speaks volumes about what's wrong with the NuTrek Enterprise:

Source: Byrne Robotics.

How would any Star Trek character explain this monstrosity to a fellow Starfleet officer without breaking the fourth wall? In real life, the designers took the original, forward-thinking Enterprise and exaggerated the components for a faux-retro look that's more 1960s than the 1960s. They were going to keep the ship close to the original scale, but then the scene in the shuttle bay didn't look impressive enough, so they doubled the size of the ship to increase the wow factor. No Starfleet engineer says, "This shuttle bay isn't jaw-dropping enough; let's double the effort and resources required for the whole construction."

Part of the reason I like the Vengeance so much is that it at least looks like a plausible product of Starfleet covert ops engineering. It's essentially a mashup of two canonical starship classes (Constitution refit and Sovereign), with creative elements that give the ship a unique look without altering the weight and lines of traditional Starfleet design. Even the Kelvin, lopsided as it is, has a sense of balance in line with that of the Oberth or Constellation classes.

The USS Vengeance. Yes, I know this is a Christmas ornament, but you can barely tell the shape of the ship from what's shown in the movie. Source: Memory Alpha.

When I look at the Abramsprise, all I can see are the ridiculous nacelles. In contrast with every other vessel in Starfleet history, the nacelles are as thick as the saucer section and even thicker than the stardrive section. They're too long and close together relative to the saucer section, giving the ship the appearance of having been gripped tightly and pulled back like a balloon animal. The pylons that attach the nacelles to the rest of the ship have almost a Romulan-style curve to them; Starfleet pylons are consistently straight, and even Galaxy- and Nebula-class pylons only use curves to round off the sharpness of a right angle. Everything about the nacelles draws the attention to the back of the ship. It's also irritating that the bussard collectors glow blue instead of the usual red. That last point might seem nitpicky even for me, but try changing one of the colors on your country's national flag and see how long it takes to bother you.

Any other elongated class of starship with a sense of movement to its design (e.g., Excelsior, Sovereign) has the look of a graceful bird or a swift predator about it. The Abramsprise has the look of an animal that was injected with whatever absurd vaccine McCoy gave to Kirk that made his hands swell up in the film. The nacelles are oversized jet thrusters hanging onto the back of the ship for dear life, and the saucer section fits onto the secondary hull like a full-sized sombrero on a child. There's no way this ship was designed by the same Starfleet engineers who would've made the Enterprise we know and love if some angry Romulan hadn't killed Kirk's dad.

Here's a comparison shot that helps illustrate how absurdly exaggerated the Abramsprise's features are—note that the engineering hull is basically the same size on both vessels (and also the bridge module, but you can barely tell here):

It's like the two silliest moments of The Animated Series at once: the real Enterprise riding piggyback on an inflatable starship decoy.

I think about the thought processes that went into designing the Reliant (immediately recognizable as Starfleet, but with a different shape so as not to confuse it with the Enterprise), the Excelsior (the Enterprise, but with an elegant Japanese aesthetic), and the Defiant (built for war, not exploration), and they all ask, "WWSD?" (What Would Starfleet Design?). The proportions, the contours, they all make sense to me. Nothing makes sense to me about the Abramsprise, and I can barely get a good look at the whole thing because my eyes keep sliding down the ship and falling off the back of it. This is not redesigning a ship for a new generation; this is having a little too much fun with Kai's Power Goo.

NuTrek had an opportunity to craft an Enterprise that made more sense as a successor to the NX-01. And as far as the story is concerned, there's not nearly enough of a rationale for why the new Enterprise looks so drastically different from the one that would have been designed if Nero hadn't shown up for two minutes. Early design sketches of the reboot Enterprise hint at a faithfulness to the source material, but the finished product seems to reflect the personal taste of the director more than the 50 years of Star Trek history that should have played into the design. I could even live with the retro-futuristic design if it leaned more toward TOS in terms of surface detail; ironically, those complex textures make the ship look too close to the Starfleet aesthetic from TMP onward, which only serves to emphasize the differences with the rest of the ship.

This could have been the Abramsprise, and I could have lived with it. The differences are subtle, but vital. We were so close. Source: Memory Alpha.

On the other end of the spectrum is something like this redesign by Gabriel Koerner, featured in a Star Trek: Ships of the Line calendar predating the 2009 reboot, which captures a lot of that NX-01 feel without sacrificing the shape of the ship. Source: Memory Beta.

Somewhere between the two designs above is the Enterprise that should have carried us into the future.

Every good hero has an origin story. Often, the stories are rooted in tragedy; family members of heroes-to-be have an alarmingly high mortality rate. Accidents, coincidences, even destiny itself have been known to set a hero on the path to adventure. No matter the details, origin stories all have one thing in common: they bore me to tears.

When Frodo Baggins finally leaves the Shire, or when Harry Potter finally arrives at Hogwarts, then things get interesting to me. I outright refused to see the reboots of Fantastic Four and Spider-Man; I don't need to spend at least half a movie waiting for these mundane characters to turn into superheroes again, having just watched it happen a mere decade ago. Heroes are like meals at a restaurant: I don't mind learning about how they're made, but I don't need to see the whole process every single time. More often than not, origin stories aren't even appetizers; they're the waiter standing there with a tray of food, talking about where it came from instead of serving it to you.

If I want an origin story, I want an origin story. Batman: Year One is one of my favorite graphic novels, despite being nothing but an origin story, because it spends all 96 pages telling a compelling, self-contained tale that just happens to take place earlier in Bruce Wayne's life than we're used to seeing. The path to becoming a hero is the story, not just the first third or half of the story that takes away from the time I could be spending watching Batman be Batman.

That's why I like the first Iron Man movie as much as I do: Tony Stark is Iron Man, and there's no waiting involved to see the character you signed up for. The only difference is that he gets cooler tech as the story progresses. As the movies go on, Tony's origin story continues to play an instrumental role in his development. This is not some one-and-done explanation of how he became a superhero; the shrapnel in his chest and his fixation on building a legacy before he dies are persistent reminders of his origin story. The origin and the story are too intertwined for the former to feel like a roadblock to the latter.

That's why I also like Captain America: The First Avenger, despite it being yet another origin story (set during a time period that's been overdone in film, no less). At first, Steve Rogers is hardly the shield-slinging super soldier he goes on to become, but he's still a hero in his own right. Cap's roots as a scrawny, straight-laced, diehard patriot are essential to appreciating who this character is and what he stands for, and we don't need to wait for him to power up before he starts growing a personality or dealing with conflicts of any real consequence.

Compare this with Star Wars. (Yes, I'm about to criticize Star Wars.) Luke Skywalker lives on a boring moisture farm on a boring rock called Tatooine doing boring jobs for his boring uncle. It's abundantly clear that Luke (and the audience, if the audience is me) desperately wants something—anything—interesting to happen. When adventure finally finds him, there's a transition period where Luke is still a naive, excitable farm boy seeing the galaxy for the first time...and then he's suddenly a confident action hero, with little or no trace of his previous character traits. By the start of the next movie, nothing that happened before meeting Ben Kenobi really matters anymore. It's origin stories like this that drive me mad. Yes, it's important to Luke's character arc to show his progression from an average teenager to the savior of the galaxy, but we don't need to spend so much time with his old friends, adopted parents, and drudgerous life on a moisture farm to understand what he's leaving behind, particularly if the story never refers back to them after a certain point.

A narrative doesn't always need to develop a full backstory for the heroes, nor does it need to present all the backstory in chronological order. Super Mario Bros. for the NES drops you right into the action; there's no time wasted on playing as Mario in the real world for the first few levels so you can appreciate his humble origins as a plumber. Firefly is selective about how its characters' origin stories are conveyed, leaving much of the past shrouded in mystery until it's narratively rewarding to reveal more. In the case of origin stories, I believe that less is generally more; you can always shed more light on a character's past as a story progresses, but you can never give back time spent setting up the story people came to see.

I think the solution may be to drop the "origin story" designation altogether. Just tell one good story, instead of two separate stories that need to be told together. If we learn something about the hero's background in the process, so much the better.

March was another busy month. No sooner had I submitted my entry for the Make a Good Mega Man Level contest on Sprites INC than another contest opened up: designing any number of six-screen level segments for the upcoming Mega Man Endless fangame. Between friends, family, work, and my deadline-driven side projects, I was going almost nonstop by the end of the month. It was exhausting, but it was also a reminder of how I thrive on having a variety of activities to keep me occupied. Let's see what all I have to show for myself.

I might not write many posts anymore, but the ones I do write are ones I want to hang on to. The story of my concert experience with Star Trek: The Ultimate Voyage is one of my favorite things I've written for this blog, and I think it's the biggest indication that I've finally moved away from the "general bitterness commentary" that weighed down my writing only a year or two ago. Also, I've decided to start linking to my individual Series Opinions articles once they're finished, regardless of whether everything else on the page with them is finished. I've still got a lot of Star Trek and Mega Man to write about (and rewrite about, because opinions are subject to change), but I'm one step closer to having my definitive take on every part of my favorite entertainment franchises all in one place.

Due to all the time I spent makingMega Man levels in February and March, I wasn't able to focus on playing Mega Man levels, (meaning my playthrough of Mega Man 8 got delayed)...but I did subject one of my friends to a level I made, so we can call that a compromise. I did keep another one of my recording projects going, though, carrying on with the next installment in what is possibly my favorite first-person shooter series. I like MotS less than its predecessor, but I think I like this playthrough more than the one I did for the original Jedi Knight. So it balances out. Pardon the choppiness of the first video; it gets better.

Wow. This portion almost isn't worth mentioning. My wife and I played one round of LEGO LotR and were put off enough by all the glitches and gameplay issues that we haven't found the motivation to go back yet, and I played just enough of Nintendo Land with friends that it qualifies as Beaten by my standards. Oh, and I chipped away at X-Men Legends and played a little more of the 3DS Mega Man Legacy Collection, so it's not like I completely abandoned my favorite pastime.

Started:
- LEGO The Lord of the Rings (Wii)

Beat:
- Nintendo Land (WiiU)

...And that's just the stuff I finished in March! April oughta be pretty big, and I'm in a great mindset going into the month.